Facing some of the most difficult education challenges of their careers, education leaders and practitioners are eager to ground their decisions in the best available evidence and data. But they don’t have time to wade through peer-reviewed papers and randomized controlled trials to find evidence-based answers to these questions.
Education researchers can help by providing actionable insights - rooted in high-quality research and synthesized into short, easy-to-digest evidence briefs – to help education leaders make informed, student-centered decisions as they consider which strategies will work best in their schools and their communities.
That’s why we created the EdResearch for Recovery Project.
- Crowdsource practitioner questions- Over the last two months, we reached out to diverse networks of leaders and organizations to build an ever-growing list of the most common questions about how to respond to education challenges posed by COVID-19. State and local policymakers, educators, parents and other education advocates across the country entered questions into a shared document.
- Identify highest priority topics- We organized the ever-expanding list of questions into a framework of categories and high-priority topic areas.
- Identify research partners- We enlisted some of the nation’s leading education researchers to ask their help in quickly but rigorously synthesizing the research to help education decision makers identify the best strategies to pursue. Each lead researcher gathered a group of consulting researchers to identify crucial evidence on strategies to consider and strategies to avoid on their topic. Lead authors drafted - and rewrote...and rewrote again – these evidence syntheses.
- Consult with leading experts and practitioners- Researchers and practitioners working in districts, state agencies, non-profit organizations provided feedback on accuracy and actionability.
- Build out a library of resources- These briefs are designed to be conversation starters, providing policymakers, school leaders, teachers, parents, community leaders, philanthropic leaders, and other advocates with the evidence they need to have an informed debate about which strategies will work best in their schools and their communities.
- Catalyze conversations- We actively leveraged relationships with networks to engage decision-makers. We plan to host virtual events where researchers can join policymakers, practitioners, community leaders and other advocates to discuss the findings as they grapple with existing questions and generate new questions for further research.
Funding for this research was provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The findings and conclusions contained within the research briefs are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect positions or policies of the foundation.